Free speech is a dead issue, since it is one of the few universally held civil liberties everyone believes in.
Hardly. I'd argue almost nobody truly does, though many will state they do.
The first problem about it is that for people living in democracies (especially the US), having a legal definition of free speech causes a confusion between the law, which is just a tool, and the actual value of free speech as a concept. If you ask people why they think free speech is a good thing (if they do in the first place, which is increasingly not all that universal), they will almost always fail to mention that free speech serves the listener more than it does the speaker. That in fact, it serves everyone and makes us all able to identify problems in our societies.
Being exposed to an idea is a good thing no matter who happens to think that this idea should not be expressed. Be it the government, a company or the local homeowner's association, it really makes no difference whatsoever. However, the law typically gives non-government entities broad authority over what kind of communication can happen using their stuff.
Of course, legally that makes sense. But just because someone or some company can legally exercise this right to censor doesn't mean they should. Again, being an obstacle to the diffusion of ideas is not a good thing. It should only be done when seriously considering the implications and taking the utmost care in letting potentially interested listeners still take part if they wish so.
To me the central issue with speech online is that of user choice. The current model of centralized and federated platforms doesn't really deal with this adequately. The individual user should have the power to decide what they want to listen to and talk about. We're all different, and there's only an extremely thin slice of discourse that's universally considered not worth listening to.
The problem with this of course, is ideological ostracism. For a staggering amount of people, if they see someone even just unwillingly in contact with content that belongs to an enemy ideology, that someone becomes suspicious, as they could be an enemy hiding their true colors. You see this playing out like clockwork with the Fediverse. If you don't understand what I mean, here's a relatively uncontroversial example: climate action advocates routinely get criticized for having debates with the other side of the issue. This is tribal logic, and it's killing us.
Elden Ring is absolutely not harder than the average NES platformer and I'd be surprised anyone familiar with both would say this. It is certainly not harder than Shovel Knight, and even that is not anywhere near harder the games that it was inspired by.
If anything, Elden Ring shows that one way to make a popular hit game is to gather a reputation of superlative quality but also difficulty, obtuseness and harsh gameplay through more than a decade of games in the same genre, and then slightly change the formula by making a new game significantly more accessible and easier.
I think it is obvious that one of the reasons why this works is that as FROM garnered the praise of hardcore gamers, people who sat next to them were eager to try these games but afraid of the difficulty. With a new installment proving much more accessible, it sort of opened the floodgates of people who had been reluctant before. The complete opposite of Sekiro, which despite being tighter gameplay-wise, didn't see the same kind of commercial success because it is almost entirely skill-based and thus much more limited in audience.
And this is not me bashing on Elden Ring, it is in my opinion one of the best games FROM has released. Fact of the matter is, if you play without arbitrary restrictions, Elden Ring is only slightly more difficult than a modern open world game.
Now that sounds like an excellent way to make a "fraudulent" business which can't actually be convicted of anything fraudulent.
Pretend you have way to correlate email addresses with consumption of various products. Refuse to reveal anything about the sources, only say you're using generative AI to analyze the source data. In reality, the data is entirely fabricated.
If you manage to sell this to a data broker, good job you have made the world just slightly better.
At least these two idiots contributed to give a dozen more examples of the police completely giving up doing their job, and thus hopefully move public opinion in the right direction.
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Elden Ring is absolutely not harder than the average NES platformer and I'd be surprised anyone familiar with both would say this. It is certainly not harder than Shovel Knight, and even that is not anywhere near harder the games that it was inspired by. If anything, Elden Ring shows that one way to make a popular hit game is to gather a reputation of superlative quality but also difficulty, obtuseness and harsh gameplay through more than a decade of games in the same genre, and then slightly change the formula by making a new game significantly more accessible and easier. I think it is obvious that one of the reasons why this works is that as FROM garnered the praise of hardcore gamers, people who sat next to them were eager to try these games but afraid of the difficulty. With a new installment proving much more accessible, it sort of opened the floodgates of people who had been reluctant before. The complete opposite of Sekiro, which despite being tighter gameplay-wise, didn't see the same kind of commercial success because it is almost entirely skill-based and thus much more limited in audience. And this is not me bashing on Elden Ring, it is in my opinion one of the best games FROM has released. Fact of the matter is, if you play without arbitrary restrictions, Elden Ring is only slightly more difficult than a modern open world game.
Now that sounds like an excellent way to make a "fraudulent" business which can't actually be convicted of anything fraudulent. Pretend you have way to correlate email addresses with consumption of various products. Refuse to reveal anything about the sources, only say you're using generative AI to analyze the source data. In reality, the data is entirely fabricated. If you manage to sell this to a data broker, good job you have made the world just slightly better.
A small good thing in the long run
At least these two idiots contributed to give a dozen more examples of the police completely giving up doing their job, and thus hopefully move public opinion in the right direction.